The Terror: The Execution of Marie Antoinette (Part 3)

Tom Holland (0:11)

It is now 16 or 17 years since I saw the Queen of France, then the Dauphiness at Versailles, and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch. A more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in, glittering like the morning star, full of life and splendour and joy. Oh, what a revolution! And what a heart must I have to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that form. Little did I dream when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom. Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry has gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded. And the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. So that's one of the most celebrated pieces of prose ever written about the French Revolution. It was written by the Anglo-Irish politician and philosopher Edmund Burke, often seen as one of the godfathers of conservatism. Burke wrote those words in 1790 So very early on in the Revolution, he was prompted by the tumultuous events, really of 1789, the March on Versailles by a mob of market women and of revolutionary militants. The attack by night on the apartments of the Queen of France, which had sent her running barefoot to the bedchamber of her husband to seek sanctuary and the removal of the royal family to Paris, never to return to Versailles. Tom, to Edmund Burke, as to so many like-minded people across Europe, this was practically sacrilegious, wasn't it?

Dominic Sandbrook (2:10)

Yeah, because the French monarchy was the most splendid, the most magnificent in the whole of Europe. It provided a role model for every other royal family.

It stood at the apagée of an entire society that was founded on loyalty and manners and notions of honor, which ultimately reached back a millennium and more to the very beginnings of the French monarchy amid the collapse of Roman Gaul. Its roots are that deep. Now, to Burke and to people who read Burke and admired his sentiments, it seemed that everything that was most glorious about that monarchy and about those traditions were being reduced to kind of arid politicking about rights and money, which is essentially the issues that were current in 1789 and 1790 But of course, for the monarchy, and specifically for the king and queen of France, it gets a lot worse after 1790 I think for admirers of everything that royalism could be, the queen of France, the heroine of that passage, that very florid passage that you read, stood as a much more potent symbol of the French monarchy than the queen's dull and plodding husband, Louis XVI. Because the queen was, of course, Marie Antoinette, a figure who was famous across Europe for her glamour. She's a woman who was perpetually setting new trends with her clothes, her hairstyles, her whole way of life. She was on one hand bred into the height of luxury. She wasn't just the wife of the King of France, but the sister of the Emperor of Austria. But she was also a woman who had found herself stifled by the formalities of court life at Versailles. She had worn the most expensive jewels in Europe. In fact, diamonds got her into quite a lot of trouble over the course of her time on the throne. But also famously in the Petit Trianon, her hideaway in the grounds of Versailles, she played it being a shepherdess. This was a woman who was incredibly mobile in her tastes, in her sense of fashion. She's always at the cutting edge of what is modish. I think that she is viewed by historians of fashion as not just a representative figure of the Ancien Régime, the regime that gets toppled in the French Revolution, but of ideals of fashion that will emerge in the 19th century, and which are still very current in France today. In that sense, she's a trendsetter because she is a woman who, by always changing her dress, is establishing the idea of fashion as something that is never stable, that is constantly evolving. She is the face of the future as well as of the past.

Tom Holland (4:51)

But arguably far more striking is Marie Antoinette's role in the propaganda of the 1780s that leads to the French Revolution, isn't it? Because she's loved by lots of people, but she's absolutely detested by others.